Electronic devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, pagers, and interactive digital appliances have become indispensable as a tool as the number of features and functions they provide increases. As technology continues to evolve, a manufacturer of such devices will find it imperative to update these devices with revised software that enables a number of new features and functions.
The term “software” used herein is intended to include not only software, but also or alternatively firmware. Similarly, the term “firmware” used herein is intended to include not only firmware, but also or alternatively software.
When existing software in memory of an electronic device must be updated as a result of a version upgrade, the new version of the software may require more memory space than the existing version. An attempt to replace the existing version with the new version by replacement with new software may cause a shifting or relocation of adjacent code not related to the application software. Such relocations require the modification of software code in order to provide continued operation of the updated feature or function. These modifications often involve re-compiling any software code that is affected by address references to the relocated code. As a result, the size of an update may be quite large. The effects of shifting and relocation of adjacent software code as a part of a software update may result in significant costs to a manufacturer. Furthermore, the time it takes to update a software may increase due to a large update size, and this provides an inconvenience to any user.
In order to perform a software update, it is important to evaluate the free memory space available should the update size occupy a larger space than the existing software. However, it is often difficult to assess the amount of free or unused memory available in an electronic device's memory because the free space may contain un-initialized random bit patterns. Free or unused memory in electronic devices provided by different manufacturers is usually not initialized, making it difficult to determine the location and size of any unused or free space. When performing updates of firmware in an electronic device, the amount of unused memory required for installation is often critical.
During a manufacturing cycle, a manufacturer typically burns copies of identical software modules for their devices. However, the unused or free space may not have a consistent binary pattern. As a result, any two similar devices with the same make and model may often end up with different memory (ROM, RAM or FLASH) snapshots or images. When attempting to determine the difference between versions of software resident in the memory of any two devices, any unused space in either memory that contains random un-initialized sequences makes it difficult to compare the two.
In the case of mobile handsets, the software that is often updated and stored in read-only memory (ROM) or programmable ROM (PROM) is called firmware. Firmware is often responsible for the behavior of a system when it is first switched on and is used to properly boot up a mobile handset when powered up. The unused memory space generated by a particular firmware image may be filled with a random sequence of binary data. This results in firmware images that are not necessarily consistent across handsets with the same firmware version. In comparing the firmware images from two different handsets of the same type, the firmware may appear to be significantly different from each other, when in reality they may be identical. As a result, it becomes a difficult task to easily identify the version of software loaded in an electronic device based on the image it presents. Further, it becomes difficult to determine whether a device requires an update.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.